But Bowie hasn't emigrated just in order to revolutionise pop music - even though he regards German bands such as Kraftwerk or Neu! as the most innovative in the entire world during the mid-1970s. What tempts him there is the Expressionist Berlin of his childhood dreams. Bowie grew up with silent movies such as The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. He was deeply influenced by the aesthetics of Brechtian theatre. In Schöneberg the pop star grows an artist's beard; he goes to the Brücke Museum in Grunewald to study the pictures of his idols Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel and Otto Mueller. It is on their Expressionist motifs that Bowie models the record cover of Heroes and the scenery for his eponymous world tour.

Above all, though, in Berlin Bowie makes himself at home among the stage props of past epochs. For in his new home the post-war era is still a reality. Less than 500 metres from Bowie's flat in Schöneberg is the courthouse where the men who plotted to kill Hitler on 20 July, 1944, were tried. After the war, the same building housed the Allied control council and later the headquarters of Allied air security. Every day, Bowie bicycles past it on his way to the Hansa Studio. The latter is right next to the Wall, by the flattened site of Potsdamer Platz, the pre-war hub of Berlin. His son Zowie attends the British Forces' school. Bowie himself often crosses the Wall at Checkpoint Charlie to visit East Berlin, where he eats at the Ganymede Restaurant next to Brecht's Berliner Ensemble. After the artificial worlds of Hollywood, where Bowie had lived since 1975, Berlin must have been a kind of historical shock therapy. The historian Timothy Garton Ash, who studied in West Berlin at about the same time, once came up with this formula to describe his journeys from England to the Eastern bloc: "I flew British Airways. Departure: 1983. Arrival: 1945." David Bowie must have felt rather like this, too.

"Berlin had to live up to its Isherwood myth," writes Garton Ash about the 1970s in his memoir The File, which documents many of the romantic illusions that surround Bowie in Berlin from the point of view of a sceptical scholar. The parallels are curious: Garton Ash comes to the city in 1978 to write a doctoral dissertation about "Berlin under Hitler"; he lives in a similar art nouveau building and even frequents the same fashionable dives: Exil, a restaurant in the bohemian area of Kreuzberg, the Paris Bar near the Zoo Station, and the drag club Chez Romy Haag. Garton Ash's memoir is haunted by the same types as Bowie's songs: elderly aristocratic Prussian ladies, pale correspondents from Oxford in run-down bedsits - a world straight out of Christopher Isherwood. Before his move to Berlin, Bowie had encountered the author of Goodbye to Berlin in February 1976 in Los Angeles and grilled him about what it had been like at the end of the Weimar Republic with the Nazis on the march. Isherwood's boarding house from Goodbye to Berlin had been in the Nollendorfstrasse, a 10-minute bicycle ride for Bowie. He even finds his Sally Bowles in the transsexual Romy Haag.

I have to credit Hasselhoff instead of Bowie - not merely due to his superior talent, but due to the actions of the Berliners themselves. Look at that video of the massive crowds responding to Hasselhoff - it was simply a far greater reaction than that toward Bowie.

tilda

December 8th, 20082:12 PM

Just a couple of years ago, David Hasselhoff let us in on the fact that he was the one who (almost single-handedly) tore down the Berlin wall with his song "Looking for Freedom".
But this year it turns out to have been David Bowie all along, and he did it twelve years before it actaully happened. But then again, Bowie was always way ahead of his time...

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